Illegal League Strategy?

Maybe I have to explain the arena thing (?)

In arena, you get bonus trophies equal to arena points.

Arena points are awarded for wins, and win streaks.

A win is worth 2, but your second consecutive win is worth 3. Consecutive wins after that are all worth 4.

For example 2 wins in a row = 5 arena points
3 wins in a row = 9
5 wins in a row = 17

The way arenas are scheduled, you play about 12-15 games. So someone who wins a blitz arena may have won 15 games. Someone who wins a bullet arena may have won 15 games.

So far nothing sounds unfair... but the point is bullet arenas are 30 minutes long while blitz are 1 hour long. This means I can play two bullet arenas for every blitz arena. Doubling the arena points means doubling the bonus trophies.

Ok, I see what you mean.

I do think a totally ignorant person, who has only read the rules, still has a chance. They would simply choose to play in arenas for 16 hours a day (something like that). Such a person would have already gotten (or come very close to) 10k trophies in a single week, yet we haven't seen anyone like that yet.

In other words a totally naive person giving max effort would be able to top the leaderboards, so they shouldn't give up hope yet.

(They would give up when they realize a 3000 bullet player giving max effort would be close or more than 20k in a week, but that takes a little bit of investigating.)

No chance. If you follow the rules you've no chance. How does this fix the problem of people who agree to split prizes in finals week working in tandems? If you're at the same computer and agree to play the same openings, there's no way they could catch you. I mean that's just the simplest way that I can conceive of skirting the rules and it took me five seconds to come up with that. People are scheming up more elaborate ways as we speak.

Sure, I was saying the same thing on the first day, like 4 weeks ago

I guess the main question is:  why should chess.com care?

The purpose of the competition is...
To find the best players? No.
To find the most active players? Not really (different divisions are different difficulty).
The purpose is to get more activity. Maybe trying to funnel people into "play" vs "live" (as "live" doesn't give any trophies). Maybe to encourage arenas. Probably both.

What annoys me (I know I've said it 100x by now) is that they did things like adjust trophies for length of game, but not length of arena. This would make sense if they wanted to encourage more people to play in bullet and blitz arena for some reason.

It also annoys me that they didn't consider simuls. 

If they made simuls legal, then I have no problem with it. I don't care if paying members (particularly titled members who didn't even have to pay) have an advantage... but the fact that they (apparently) didn't even realize playing simuls was a strategy (or they found it too inconvenient to account for it in the code)... that's what annoys me.

Exactly: they don't care, not really. Of course they have to pay lip service to trying to plug holes in this lurching Titanic, but in the end it's just about making money. My goal here is only a little bit about railing against the system. I also want people to realize that they are wasting their time and fooling themselves if they think they've got an honest shot at winning this thing. A dishonest shot? Sure.

Annoyed? I don’t get it. That the whole scheme is nothing more than a marketing strategy to generate more games/ hence more clicks / hence more revenue = doesn’t bother you that it’s about the $ and profits… but you are annoyed that apparently the organizers did not take into consideration those factors being described ( how the pairings and trophies can be artificially manipulated)?

Well- I say this …. of course they knew all along. It is all by design. All members are entered by default. Opportunities abounded to scam the system as no guidelines or rules are written, hence zero enforcement in an anything goes tournament. The amount of games being played has greatly increased . The marketing department has scored another coup. Advertising  is laughing all the way to the bank.

Who knew that chesscom is giving double-standards. They should ban simuls for league points just like how they banned variants for league points!!!

On the other hand. League is just like the giant daily chess tournaments like the 2022 chesscom tournament going on now. Just say to yourselves that you will never advance in the leagues and when you do then you'll be surprised...

[quote]NikkiLikeChikki wrote: Leagues are absolutely not a representation of skill, it's a representation of how much of a mindless automaton you can be... That's all.[/quote]
 

Yes. It's just like those high hand promotions in casinos that offer poker. Skill doesn't win in those games.

If they didn't care, why are they trying to fix simuls after the fact?

If they didn't care, why did they adjust trophies by game length?

This is inconsistent, and inconsistency suggests stupidity... and that's what really annoys me.

Is it simpler to explain with just lack of effort? Sure. They had minimum effort before, and they're only fixing a few things now because the minimum is a little higher (for whatever reason, take your pick, maybe they had some free time they didn't know what to do with).

But the small chance that it was pure stupidity... it really bugs me.

They are trying to "fix" it because if they don't at least appear to be trying to do something, then there really will be a community outcry. We call this lip service.

They are actively deciding the best route to take and then implementating a fix. 

I just feel like...

I'm sure there are many competent people who work for chess.com. Some of them will be more familiar with things like logic and math, for example their developers.

All they'd have to do is include one of those people at some point during the planning phase. Just ask for their feedback. It wouldn't be a months long ordeal that distracts them from their other work. They'll think of these things in a single day. These are not complicated ideas.

Yeah, but this was hatched by the marketing department and rushed out because of the dollar signs floating in front of the eyes of those in charge. That's really the most parsimonious explanation of how such an obviously flawed system came into being. The competent folks probably had some objections but were shouted down.

Well, we can imagine all we like. It certainly makes for a nice story

How charmingly naive and old-fashioned!

Nowadays the development departments are just storage silos for people with correct skin pigmentation and correct chromosome pairs.

How do you think they (C.C) ended in this predicament in the first place?

A fix to what? The people building up trophies by using disallowed simuls? That should be relatively easy. What I'd like to know is how you implement a fix to players tag-teaming on the same account to log hours. That one seems to be the most impossible to fix. There are no rules limit to hours played, so it's possible to have an account log all 168 hours in a week with just 2 people doing 12 hours a day each. It's actually not impossible for one person to do it since the record is 264 hours without sleep, so you couldn't disqualify them on the grounds of physical impossibility.

The best is to quit leagues, soon the people won’t have much to compete with and it might get boring for them

Overall, they're deciding the best implementation and will have to work a solution that fits.  The previous changes were done in a few days.

A fix to rated simuls giving trophies.

I don't know if they plan on looking at time played, but they might, and could decide to reset that progress, if it appears to be the case. I haven't seen discussion about the possibility, but it's possible that discussion is taking place. And I'm sure they could disqualify something like that.

IOW working out the kinks before the finals, so not a big deal?

I guess that's fine.

Much simpler is the idea of an account being active for 16-20 hours a day with a buddy helping you 2-4 hours a day just so you can have the comfort of a few meals and adequate sleep.

But no competition is perfect. I don't fault chess.com for things like this.